Listen to any discussion about education. The main thing you will hear is confusion. Everyone has a theory. No one has a compelling answer. Worse than that, many of the supposed issues and their solutions are irrelevant distractions. They prevent everyone from focusing on what is really important.

Lets first consider what might be called The World According to Bill Gates and the Education Establishment. Their answers tend to be financial, administrative, bureaucratic, psychological, and even ideological. Here are a few of their many buzzwords: school size, class size, unions, tenure, charter schools, teacher accountability, vouchers, alternative assessment, equity, teaching methods, technology, new standards, ETC. There might be good in all these ideas. At the same time, I tend to think they factor out, by which I mean a school might have X, another school might not, and both could end up being equally effective. So X is clearly not what we should be talking about.

Now lets consider an alternative universe of ideas based on this premise: if you want to improve education, make it more educational. I think everything can be boiled down to an eight-word agenda. In the early grades, children learn reading, writing, arithmetic, and geography. After a few years, they segue into history, science, literature, and the arts. Thats it, eight words, since the beginning of civilization. If a school is taking care of its serious business, everything else will follow. You will have happy students. You will have triumph upon triumph upon triumph. Conversely, all of our present mediocrity and miseries have resulted because schools refuse to take care of their serious business. Its like a man marrying but thereafter refusing to speak to his wife.

The Education Establishment, it seems to me, is a factory for producing fads and excuses. The main thrust of all this activity is to justify the continuing reduction of academic content in classrooms, as John Dewey ordered a century ago. But facts and foundational knowledge are the very lifeblood of education. Indeed, facts are fun; and knowledge is power.

Kids are kept in school 1,000 hours each year, but somehow public schools manage to teach many of them only a few measly bits of information. Other than that, its all theater and illusion. Kids may seem busy, but learn little. Millions of American teenagers dont know what seven times nine is, or where Japan is on a map.

Never forget that this country has 50 million functional illiterates; and our students dont do well against international competition in any subject.

Here is a very simple example of the problem. I would think that all American citizens should know the names of the 50 states. This should be a requirement for graduation from high school or perhaps middle school. However, if you propose this goal in some public schools, you will be attacked in two startling ways.

Children, it will be claimed, could not possibly handle such a difficult and unreasonable task. Second, you will be told that children dont need such information. Both claims are laughable; and we should all fight such arguments whenever they are encountered.

(If children shouldn't know the names of the states, what should they know?? Pretty soon you are down to their own names. Probably there is a professor at Harvard arguing just that. See how it works? Less, always less.)

So, if you want to improve public schools, here are two simple themes to rally behind. Schools should teach more. Students should learn more.

The good news is that we have wonderful new technologies--digital, videos, television, the Internet. It would be so easy to design schools that are both entertaining and educational.

The great achievement of our Education Establishment is to design so many schools that are neither.

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For how to put the education back in Education, see "A Bill of Rights for Students 2012" http://www.improve-education.org/id90.html

A friend of mine had a parent/teacher conference regarding his high school senior. He told them he thought they did a piss poor job as educators. They immediately went into confrontational liberal mode and wanted him to give examples. He said, "I've been listening to my son for three years plus now and I often talk with him about his studies. It's obvious to me that you teach opinion and not fact. AS a result, he is neither ready for college or the real world."

As for Stop Stealing Dreams, I tend not to trust so many soft words softly describing something I’m not sure what it is. Some of these reformers can go and on for a book and you’re still not sure what is actually proposed. At least (this to wintertime) you know what I’m saying.

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